Diamonds Are Forever
by Born-Of-Elven-Blood
Summary: No matter how much he rationalizes it, a computer chip is not a diamond. But then, he isn't human, and he has no intention of asking. [Twelve/Clara, SPOILER WARNING for "Face the Raven"]
1. Part I

**Disclaimer: The plot and characters of Doctor Who are not mine, and this story is not for sale or profit. (But if, by some miracle, it should turn out that I was right, remember, I totally called it!)**

 **A/N: This is a cheesy bit of head canon based on a play on words that has been brewing in my brain since "The Girl Who Died"; after "Face the Raven" it all just came boiling out onto paper all at once. I don't know where the show writers plan to go from here, but I refuse to believe that Clara is really, finally dead, and this is my own personal theory on how things might have actually gone down during off-screen moments when we weren't looking. I don't consider it AU, because you can't prove it didn't happen! (Denial is not just a river in Egypt…)**

 **Pairing: Twelve/Clara**

 **Warnings: Spoilers for Season 9 of Doctor Who**

* * *

 **DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER**

* * *

 **PART I**

 **A continuation of "The Girl Who Died"**

* * *

"What's a diamond, after all?" the Doctor mutters to himself, punching a numeric sequence almost defiantly into the TARDIS console. "Compressed carbon, sure, sure, but there's also some very sound scientific, mathematical and linguistic arguments to be made for a rhomboid polygon in a two dimensional plane, so really, all things considered, any four-sided geometric figure viewed from the correct angle would qualify... technically…"

He pulls a few levers, mostly for something to do with his hands. Then he grips the edge of the console as though trying to keep from falling off of the floor onto the ceiling. The world seems to be shifting uncertainly around him, even though the TARDIS is flying smoothly for once. He stares down at the console keys, not really seeing them. He has been pacing almost manically around the control room since Clara went to freshen up, eager for a wash after nearly a week in the company of Vikings – leaving him alone with his thoughts. And no one to manage his conscience.

Pushing away from the console, he unclenches his fist and holds the object he has been clinging to up to the light, examining it warily, like an alien creature he is not yet sure he can trust not to go for his throat. Thrilled and horrified by what he is about to do.

Justifications swirl around the doubt in his head and in his hearts. Every law of time, ever rule of ethical conduct, every vertebra in the back bone of the morality that has guided him during his travels, groans under the weight of what he now dares to contemplate.

All the while he is tracking Clara's movements. He could watch her on the monitors if he chose, but there is no need. He knows her. He can see her in his mind, and is beside her step by step in his imagination as she makes her way to her room.

As he watches now she…

 _...steps into her room, and out of her clothing, pausing before the mirror (because she's Clara, and she will)._

 _Now she's in the shower, and she takes her time, because it bothers her for some reason that he apparently can't tell when she has bathed (an extra four point seven six minutes is wasted merely enjoying the steaming hot stream of water flowing over her body)._

 _Almost too soon she's back in her bedroom, warm in the old faded flannel pajamas she keeps aboard at all times (her favorites, and it pleases him to a ridiculous degree that she has always left them here, even during her misadventures with PE). Her hair is still damp, but her eyelids are drooping with fatigue and the pleasant soreness of her muscles._

 _So now she's curling up on her bed, sighing contentedly as she eases her grip on the waking world and slides down into sleep, a little smile on her face that he flatters himself he had some role in putting there…_

The Doctor sighs himself, and checks the time index unnecessarily. He knows she will be asleep by now. He is stalling, and he knows it, and it panics him, because time is running out, always, always running out for Clara. _Tick-tock! Tick-tock!_ Still he pauses, hesitating one last time with his fingers poised over the controls. Then, swallowing back the thundering of his hearts in his throat, he flips the switch under his hand with an air of finality, executing a silent command.

He knows the way to Clara's bedroom by rote. It has moved from the realm of memory into a force of instinct. He could find his way to her blind. But he keeps his eyes wide open, and endures a harrowing cycle of doubt and resolve with each step. Both deepen with every footfall, until he stands outside her door, full of dreadful certainty.

This is as far as he has ever come. Never inside. It isn't a matter of respect or privacy. He suspects that she knows that he has been all over her bedroom on Earth, sating his curiosity with an utter disregard for discretion and a fine tooth sonic comb. But there is such a thing as too much temptation. Here on the TARDIS, within his own domain, what lies beyond these doors is forbidden to him. It is a rule he made long ago. Good men don't need rules. And that is why he doesn't trust himself with her.

Turns out he was right to worry.

But he is here now, and the rulebook is in metaphorical tatters at his feet. It feels almost a sin to have come this far and go no further.

The door opens and he can hear the quiet hiss slithering menacingly from the ventilation ducts. He smells the faint tinge of the anesthetic gas flooding the room. Not much, just a little, as if that makes a difference, just enough to hold her asleep and unaware – just enough so that she won't wake until he is ready to face her. The gas doesn't affect him, but then, he's not human.

Clara obligingly doesn't stir as he steps into the sacred sanctum. She lies curled up in a nest of blankets, half on her stomach, hugging a pillow to her chest. He pauses just inside, cocking his head to one side and blinking rapidly as he examines the brand new and curious sensation that is jealousy of a pillow. To his knowledge, it is a first. This is why he keeps them around, all these wondrously brief, brightly burning little will-o-the-wisp human creatures, why they are so very important: even after more than two thousand years, they are still able to give him new experiences.

But that is not what Clara is for. Not anymore. Maybe it never was.

Pacing slowly forward, he sits down on the bed beside her, and she remains still, though a humming little sigh escapes her. She nestles more deeply into her bedding, contented as a purring cat, pulling the pillow tighter into the curve of her body and pressing her cheek against its softness. Inane jealousy flares again, and, bolstered with the daring of the unobserved, he slides his hand between flesh and fabric, so that he is cradling her cheek in his palm.

It is his turn to sigh again, his fierce eyes softening with the warmth radiating from their contact. All his longing and denial wind themselves tight around the stab of his guilt, the better to spiral painfully down between his hearts like the blade of a corkscrew, to lodge there with a thousand others.

He knows he should leave now, before it is too late. Just as he knows he will not.

His eyes trace her face, and his thumb rises of its own accord to brush the full swell of her lower lip, remembering what it felt like against his. He recalls it with a startling clarity usually lost over the edge of regeneration:

 _The surprise of that sudden unexpected contact, so eager, tenacious, just a little bit hasty in a fit of nerves and daring._

 _Hard on its heels, a different sort of surprise – that it affects him, kindling a spark in his blood, fascinating him, enticing him, so that he cannot push her away, and stands at her mercy until she sees fit to release him, leaving him tongue-tied and awkward as an untried boy._

 _And forever after that it is surprise after surprise, as he is assailed time and again at the most inconvenient moments with the urge to do it again._

 _Trumped only by constant unflagging surprise each time he finds it somewhere inside of himself to resist._

The odd irony is that they have never shared a kiss. Oh, he remembers distinctly how their mouths fit together, so neatly, so rightly, that it seems all the more a shame they never tried again. But it was never _this_ mouth – neither hers nor his. He lost his when he changed it to something so very different, and the Victorian governess died because he failed to save her. Though the soft pink mouth ghosting warm breath against the pad of his thumb is so very much the same as he remembers, it belongs here and now to a twenty-first century school teacher, and she is somebody else altogether. Any chance for a second kiss is gone forever, lost like so much else before.

Even so, it did happen, and the memory is branded on his hearts. So is it any wonder that he cannot help but wonder, as he presses down on her lower lip, exposing just an edge of pearl white teeth, what it would be like to have a _second_ first kiss? What it would it feel like to touch _these_ lips with his new mouth? He wonders if she would taste different now, if he were to tease them apart with the tip of a different tongue, and whether he would ever be able to tell whether the difference lay in her mouth or in his.

He tears his eyes away and his other hand opens to reveal once more the object he has secretly carried away from the Viking village, carefully concealed from her these past two days of apparently overbearingly Scottish brooding. A small, bone-colored computer chip lies before him, all unassuming innocence and temptation; just like Clara, just like a meant-to-be match set lying here side by side.

It is a Mire battlefield medkit.

Flipping it up and taking it by the edges in his thumb and forefinger, he turns the little square on a forty-five degree angle and purses his lips.

"Humans and penguins," he mutters with an edge of derision to hide the way his hearts flutter, "chucking rocks at each other to declare their devotion…"

He is referring to that quirky little Earthling pair-bonding ritual that involves presenting one's desired mate with a diamond, asking her to be his forever.

"Sort of a diamond. Technically a diamond. Diamond-shaped, anyway. And definitely forever…"

There had been three undamaged Mire helmets for him to salvage from. Three med chips, reprogrammed for human beings. He'd given two to Ashildr. No sense in leaving this last one lying about. It might fall into the wrong hands.

" _Immortality isn't living forever. That's not what it feels like. Immortality is everybody else dying…"_

Wrong hands, yes. Like his for example.

"… _she might meet someone she can't bear to lose. That happens, I believe."_

But is it really so wrong? So unfair? Clara once said that she had been born to save him; that she blew into the world on the most important leaf in human history, and that she was born for his sake…

 _Selfish!_

Yes, it _was_ unfair – to Clara. Clara was so much more than that, so much more than just him, or his petty need to stem his loneliness, or his desperation to see the universe through mortal eyes … so much more…

Yet even as he acknowledges this, her words echo in his head from beneath dark waters of the Fisher King's tomb, sliding his conscience sideways and slipping by.

" _You owe me! You've made yourself essential to me. You've given me something else to… to be. And you can't do that and then die. It's not fair!"_

"Well is it any fairer to me?" he whispers to her, transfixed by the fan of her eyelashes against her cheek where she lies so peacefully asleep beneath the storm of indecision raging around the hurricane's eye of terrible, shameful certainty above her. He closes his hand tightly around the med chip again, clutching it like a talisman in one hand, and cradling Clara's cheek in the other. A perfect match set. "Is it, Clara?"

" _If you love me, in any way…"_

He relaxes his hand again and looks down at the chip crouching in his palm. Like a spider, he thinks, biding its time as its web trembles with the desperate thrashing of still-struggling prey that doesn't know its fate is already decided.

No matter how he rationalizes it, a computer chip is not a diamond, and he is going to get this little ritual wrong very, very wrong. But then, he is no human, and he has no intention of asking her. Because she might say no. Or even more terrifying, she might say yes.

Once she realizes what he has done…

… _when she begins to notice the years passing, but the little lines around her eyes never deepening, the rich dark sheen of her hair never graying, and begins to wonder, begins to question, begins to suspect…_

… _when loved ones begin aging, sickening, withering, dying, leaving her behind, forever alone with the cumulative weight of their loss…_

… _when the world goes on changing, marching steadily on, and she loses pace with the flow of humanity around her and is left by the wayside, a stranger in her own timeline, forever and ever unchanged…_

When she understands what he has done to her, she may never speak to him again, may never see him again, may never run with him again. It is terrible, crushing thought; because she has become essential to him. And it is a risk he is willing to take.

With this diamond that isn't a diamond, he does not ask her to be his. He only demands that she continue to _be,_ because she is essential to him and he _cannot_ bear the alternative.

He holds the chip above her skin as the air seems to crackle with portent.

"Clara, my Clara… forgive me…"

He presses the chip to her forehead, and in an instant it has burrowed inside, the skin welling up and sealing deceptively around it, as though nothing at all had changed, instead of everything - as though she has not gone from being a dying mayfly, to functionally immortal, between one beat of her heart and the next.

He doesn't watch. Instead he has already bent double over her, before thought or circumstance can get in his way. This time he is the one kissing her without permission, stealing their second first kiss, eager, tenacious, just a little hasty with nerves and daring, hungry and hearts-broken with the bittersweet surprise that she tastes _exactly_ the way he remembers.

He draws swiftly away and rises, backing away. His mouth tingles with the lingering sensation of contact, burning with even greater hunger now that he has sampled the feast. But he no longer has the right to touch her so familiarly, now that he has violated her so thoroughly; stolen her choice. Robbed her of her death. There is shame in that burn as well, shame at his own selfishness, disgust at his cowardice, anger with his own weakness.

But he feels no regret.

"I…" he swallows against the terrible ache inside, which he has just recognized as that most terrible of oppressors – hope – and tries again. "I love you," he says to her still, silent, suddenly eternal form.

It has never been more true, because now he can risk acknowledging it, and as he gives it voice, he finds it bigger and more terrifying and more glorious than he ever suspected. His hearts contract painfully in his chest as he backs towards the door.

"When you figure it out…" he breathes, "oh, my Clara… never forgive me."

* * *

TBC in Part II

* * *

 **A/N: This bit could have been a stand alone little one shot, so feel to treat it as such if you so choose; however, to me it feels incomplete without being book-ended by Part II. You decide. Now review, review, my pretties! Muwahahahaha!**


	2. Part II

**Disclaimer: Still not mine, alas!**

 **A/n: This is the bit that was written directly after "Face the Raven". Call it catharsis; I miss Clara already! Since Part I can stand alone, you can treat this as an 'optional ending' or a separate story, or even a plot bunny for an AU (which I may do at a later date). For now, I clearly feel they work better as a whole, because we all know how FtR ended.**

* * *

 **PART II**

 **A continuation of "Face the Raven"**

* * *

The world has ended. And as he has always feared, the Doctor has outlived it.

Clara lies inert on the cobblestones like a broken doll, all her fire gone. So brave. She burned so brightly that she has burnt herself out. Nothing left but smoke in the wind.

The world has gone dark in her wake. All the fire is fled inside him now, and it burns. It burns and burns. It burns to get out and burn everything to cinders. And it burns all the hotter because it is locked inside the gentle promise she tore from him: That he will take no revenge. That he will be as brave as her. That no one will suffer.

Nobody but him. And he will.

A quantum shade. One of the few phenomena in all of time and space deadly enough to burn out even a med chip powerful enough to resurrect the dead. He should have known. There is no such thing as coincidence, and the concept of fate is a bad joke. But when he cheated Clara out of her ability to die, he s _hould have known_ that the universe would find a way to cheat him out of her immortality.

 _My fault._ Careless, selfish, he had allowed himself to become drunk on his secret, the secret knowledge of her immortality, on the wonder of Clara, always Clara, running at his side, unbound by time, unshackled by death, forever. He was supposed to take care of her, protect her, from the world and from herself. Instead he had relaxed in his vigil, selfishly ignoring the danger and rejoicing as they ran together, until, in an instant, she had run so fast and so far that she had run beyond his reach forever.

 _My fault. All my fault..._ How very him. He never learns _. Oh, Clara... my Clara... I'm so sorry... I'm sorry I failed you... I'm sorry I never told you.. never told you how much I...  
_

" _Everything you're about to say…"_ Clara whispers in his mind, already a ghost, already haunting him. "... _I already know..."_

And for an instant he nearly shatters right then and there. He nearly falls to his knees, choking on her absence. He nearly lets it break open his mind and his soul, nearly lets it free him from this terrible cage that is memory and promise and self-loathing, and nothing, nothing, nothing else now that she is _gone_.

Instead he stands. He turns. He walks.

 _"Be brave,"_ she demands. _"Heal yourself."_

Her eyes so wide and bright in his mind, that for a long, precarious instant he wants to fall into them and follow her into hell.

 _"Physician, heal thyself..."_ and for a heartsbeat, he is back on Karn, resolved, casting himself aside, choosing...

 _"Don't be a warrior! Be a doctor."_

So he holds himself back, like holding back the tide of the sea, and he stands straight, rigid and unyielding as darkstar alloy, stoic as the pain tears at him from the inside out, until the fire burning inside begins to sear him, harden him, refining the pain into anger, tempering and sharpening it like a forge, into a weapon of precision, rather than a force of wanton destruction.

 _Be a little bit proud of me, Clara..._

His last thought as the teleport bracelet activates and sends him flying like a bullet from a gun towards the ones responsible, is that at least she will never know how he betrayed her, how selfishly and recklessly he had abandoned his duty to protect and care for her to a computer chip, or that in the light of her courage, he had been such a coward and a fool. She will never know just how completely he failed her.

It is cold comfort – barely a teardrop of moisture in a burning desert – but it focuses him for the task to come.

He'll never know now just how much she really knew, and maybe it no longer matters. But _he_ know that he once gave her a diamond, for forever, and that she had chosen to run at his side, until death had parted them.

 _"Run..."_ she seems to breath into him, a phantom whisper like a hot wind fanning the flames, urging him on, daring him to be brave enough. _"Run, you clever boy. And remember me."_

Grasping the pain, he holds it tight, until it scorches his hand, until it hurts to breathe. The world flares with light, and then fades into the darkness rising up through the cold fire that is still burning, burning, burning in his eyes.

* * *

Mayor Me moved slowly out onto the street, the glitter of the teleport still shimmering on the air as the door swung shut behind her. It shouldn't have happened this way. No one was supposed to get hurt. Faced with the memory of burning black rage in the Doctor's eyes, she was forced to wonder if she had just destroyed everything she had striven to build here in her effort to save it. She looked down at Clara's crumpled form, now nothing but so much meat, and her brow tightened.

Her diaries had idealized Clara Oswald, as she herself must once have done, as a fearless and vibrant woman. The sort that would seem to fill up a room. That always had an answer. That always survived. And that believed implicitly in the Doctor – that loved the Doctor, so thoroughly, it seemed, that Me doubted either of them had ever consciously noticed. It had been a thrill to finally meet her again; and for a brief time, she had lived up to the legend.

Looking at her now was a wrenching disappointment in every sense. In the end, the woman that had so completely ensnared the insurmountable Doctor was just another mayfly.

" _Prophet! said I,_ _"_ Me quoted quietly in eulogy, for Clara, for the Doctor, and maybe for herself and her people. _"_ _Thing of evil! Prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us – but the God we both adore – tell this soul with sorrow laden, that within the distant Aidenn, it shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore – clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore. Quoth the raven…"_ Me bowed her head. _"Nevermore."_

As her Judoon guards approached to bear the corpse away, Me crouched down, brushing a hand over Clara's forehead in a gesture of genuine remorse and farewell.

A sizzling blue spark of energy arced, skin to skin.

Me gasped, drawing her hand back. Her brow furrowed thoughtfully. Then smoothed with realization. She went very still, her thoughts and plans whirling, rearranging, clicking into place in a new configuration.

"I asked him why he had never made you immortal…" Me whispered to Clara's body.

The Doctor had evaded her question, and her diaries told her that she'd never understood his reluctance. It was a mystery she'd often contemplated, but never fully understood. Now, however, the truth lay before her. There had been no reluctance; only shame. Shame, that he had already done to Clara what he had done first to Me.

The chip had been drained of power by the strain of the quantum shade's otherworldly might. Just as the chip used to resurrect Sam Swift had done all those years ago. Some forces in this world would not be denied.

Poetic justice, Me thought with a momentary stab of self-satisfaction, that his act of violation should be thus thwarted. And more poetic still that it should be, all unwitting and unintended, at the hands of Me, who had been the first victim of the Doctor's hubris. He should suffer as Me had suffered.

But he could not be allowed to transmute his grief into vengeance. She had a duty to this place and to these people, who, by her efforts to protect them, now stood in greater jeopardy than ever before. This was her mission in a life that had long ago lost all other meaning. Rebuking the Doctor could not be allowed to supersede that solemn purpose.

Me heard familiar footsteps on the stone beside her.

"Your ladyship has been busy in my absence, I see," said the newcomer, whose perpetually jaunty tone she knew as well as she knew her own voice. She looked up into the eyes of her fellow immortal, Sam Swift.

"Ready the suspended animation pod," she said by way of greeting; it was long since anything more formal was necessary between them.

"Who is she, my lady?" Swift still smiled, but his eyes were penetrating and deadly earnest.

Me looked back down at Clara.

"This is Clara Oswald. School teacher. Time traveler. Impossible girl. The Doctor's greatest weakness…" she said, a hint of a smile tugging at her lips in spite of herself. "And most importantly…"

Then she pressed the palm of her hand flat against Clara's forehead, concentrated hard on a point just between and above her eyes and pressed against it with her will. It was a trick she had learned long ago, her diaries said, when Swift had suddenly crumpled to the ground at her side, dead, and she had found she could not bear to face the next eight centuries alone, as she had the last. Not even the Doctor knew what she had discovered the power to do.

The deal was done, the inevitable had come to pass; the quantum shade had taken Clara's life.

So there was nothing now to stop Me from giving her a new one.

There was an almighty, world-shivering jolt as the chip in her head surged painfully, churning a spear of power down through her nervous system and through the dead tissue under her hand. Into the chip in Clara's. A convulsive spasm made the skin under her fingertips squirm and tense, and half a moment later, the sound of a rasping gasp reached her ears, as air was forced into lungs that had already begun to collapse.

Me opened her eyes, the world swimming and dipping with the force of the energy discharge, but already righting itself as the chip in her forehead began to repair the damage the energy transfer had done.

"…she is now, and shall remain... our guest," Me finished with all the breathless dignity she could muster. "To ensure Doctor's continued friendship and good will."

"A hostage! My, my, my, that takes me back!" Swift exclaimed, his eyes glinting as realization of just exactly who and what the woman on the ground really was dawned on him. "You do play the most dangerous games, my dear Knightmare. And the most fun!"

Swift grinned rakishly as he swaggered off to do her bidding, a new bounce in his step. He was young yet; his life had yet to lose its shine, and he still inhabited the fading husk of his humanity in a way that Me had forgotten long ago.

Me lifted her hand away from Clara's face. A little flutter of emotion quivered in her chest. It had been a long time, but she thought perhaps it was something she had once named excitement. She cocked her head thoughtfully, examining the burn mark on Clara's forehead that outlined where the chip had been sunk into her skull. The Doctor had implanted it at a forty-five degree angle, so that it appeared more a diamond than a square.

Me cocked a sardonic eyebrow and smiled almost wistfully. How quaint. She caressed Clara's cheek, tucking a stray hair behind her ear, self possession and aristocratic calm returning to replace uncertainty and fear at the sight of the weak but steady rise and fall of the other woman's chest and the faint fluttering of her eyelids.

"I think perhaps you're a very lucky woman, Clara," Me whispered to the unconscious, but undeniably living woman beside her. "I have it on good authority that he doesn't take responsibility for mere computer chips. Diamonds, on the other hand," she smirked, rising and turning away as the Judoon descended on Clara once more, this time to bear her to her prison rather than her tomb. "Diamonds are forever."

* * *

 **End ~ or is it?**

* * *

 **A/n: Not exactly a happy ending, but that most terrible of oppressors - hope - is restored! Plus, like I said, you can't prove it didn't totally happen that way off-screen! (at least until the show debunks it - I guess we'll see!). Until then, this is my defiance of Clara's fate!** **There's no way her story ended there!** **In my mind, she is alive in suspended animation, functionally immortal and just waiting for the Doctor to discover that she's alive and come rescue her! So take that, Moffat! Now grab a paddle and get to rowing, because its a long way upriver when you're rowing against the current in denial... (har har).  
**

 **There may eventually be a sequel to this, possibly headcanon, possibly AU, to one or both parts of this story, mostly depending on how the show unfolds from here. I'm also increasingly convinced of the fan theory that recent events are going to finally cause the Doctor to become the Valeyard; but that is a tall tale for another day!**

 **Big thank you to Swartzvald for beta reading this on such short notice!**

 **Review please! Let me know what you think about my little theory - and about yours! Do you think Clara is really, finally dead?**

* * *

 **-** PS - For those so patiently awaiting update on my Lokane fics, I promise I have not abandoned them! I've just been really busy, and I've made such an investment in those that I don't want to rush through them with sloppy work; I am still working on them, and they WILL be updated!


End file.
